On flying

I'm skeptical about man's ability to fly. (Women's too.) Equivocating over drink selections at 36,000 feet seems queer to me. How can we be so casual about flying? When I hear shock at news of a plane crash, I'm puzzled. My reaction is, "well, obviously. What do we think we are, ducks?"

Almost worse than flying is the undignified process of getting on a plane. It's like the most aggravating pearl of every bureaucracy strung together and then the resultant garland is squeezed tight around your neck. And they have the nerve to ask you to take off your shoes.

But flying itself is definitely worse.

I was sitting at the window seat staring at the still tarmac. I don't really like the window seat and I'm not sure what the big deal about it is. It offers one stupid "amenity": a window the size of a Kleenex box. The view from the window is usually a) clouds or b) your face reflected by impenetrable blackness. Occasionally you'll see something like the Hoover dam, but who gives a fuck. This is the twenty-first century. Before the existence of Google Maps (don't tell me to “MapQuest it,” you dinosaur) I might have considered straining my neck to that useless porthole. There is no good angle to look through a sandwich-sized four-inch-thick glass. Perhaps if you tuck yourself into the overhead compartment across the aisle, you'll catch a glimpse of a wheat field or river or something. Fuck the window seat.

The aisle seat, on the other hand, provides me with both the ability to go to the bathroom whenever I like, and the power to withhold that privilege from my seatmates. “I will be the gate-keeper this evening,” I can tell my travelling companions, “any backtalk and your toilet time will be revoked indefinitely. If you're good, I might allow a forty second stroll up the aisle.”

But on this flight, I was a window-seat sitting serf. Moments after I sat down in the third seat from the aisle, I was cemented in place by a fat couple who filled the remaining two.

(I need to mention here that this couple was not just fat: they were American Fat. This is not to say that everyone in America is fat, or that every fat person in America is this fat, but merely, that this quality of obesity is peculiar to the United States. No one anywhere else in the world is this fat, unless they have been airlifted there, bed and all, from the confines of a shitty bungalow in the Midwest. American Fat is exquisite in its grotesqueness. It permeates the body; even ones fingernails are corpulent. This couple filled the seats. If there was a metric of three-dimensional volume associated with each purchased ticket (and fuck there should be), their dollar to litre ratio was approaching fractions of Rubles. They were getting their money's worth. They were getting my money's worth. These were fat motherfuckers. I can't emphasize this enough. The bean-bag-chested couple filled the void between me and the aisle so well, I might well have requested it from the flight attendant:

"Excuse me, miss. About my seat. Would you mind boxing me in completely? I like the feeling of being buried alive by sweaty biomass while flying. What's that? A 900-pound couple? That sounds perfect.")

I really didn't care about my neighbours. They could have been fat, thin, or a pair of men sobbing into a Koran. When flying, my neighbours don't matter because I am never awake for flights.

My game plan: I'll throw on a blanket if there is one, fasten my seatbelt over it so it's visible, and lean my chair backward the slightest bit. Just enough to evade notice by persnickety skywenches. As the plane taxis before takeoff, I close my eyes and let the mere fact of air travel wash over me. The completely-true notion that 'yes, we are about to leave the ground and traverse 44% of the Earth's surface' and that if any minute thing were to go wrong, or our pilots decide to "fuck this shit" we are done. Perhaps traumatizing to some, this series of thoughts is quite soporific to me. Maybe it's my proclivity to suicide. Maybe it's the anticipation of an eight-hour flight armed with nothing by SkyMall magazine. It usually takes me a few moments to pass out completely. I haven't heard an airline's safety instructions in years. I assume the protocol is still 'jump out in a panic and use the elderly to cushion your landing'?

On this particular flight to Las Vegas, something went… wrong. Immediately after takeoff, as I was tumbling into sleep, I started feeling nauseous. And not Sartre-esque nausea. I had to puke.

Do not, I told myself. Well, in my head. If you could hear the voices in my head, it was my own inner monologue, screaming at me, urging me, not to vomit. "Don't. Don't even think about it. You can't leave. You have almost a ton of people to traverse. Just focus and concentrate. Maintain, dude."

I was pinned between and overweight couple and a tiny window offering a substantial drop. Even if I could smash the glass, I could barely fit my head through the window, and lord knows what happens to vomit at that altitude. My head would probably turn into a solid block of ice out there, and the rest of the passengers would rue my existence for the rest of the flight (or at least until the pilot turned the flight around so I could get arrested). The window was not an option.

But the thought of climbing over two mountainous people to get to a bathroom was equally off-putting. Well, it wasn't just off-putting. It seemed impossible. Like if you asked someone with diarrhea to tinker with a Rubik's cube. I started to sweat and grabbed my sick bag.

I imagine that at this point, a bunch of brain cells inside my head are congregating to discuss the matter, arguing over ruffled charts and wipe-boards filled with equations. A few are sitting around in turtlenecks urging the others to prepare for the worst. That's when a gruff old-timer stands up without a word and grabs a megaphone.

"Listen up! We are not going to puke. You hear me? Do not puke. Do not push that button. We're gonna fight this thing!"

But the option seemed very real, and I had to consider it. I grasped the tiny paper bag, pinned precariously to the cabin wall. Do I dare ruin the flight for those around me? I've never vomited in a bag before. I've vomited in a car, and a toilet, on the floor of a dorm room, all over myself sitting in a recliner, on a religious figure, over the edge of a ferry, on a fairy, in the public library, in the streets of Munich and of course, into a bowl of Tostitos, but into a bag? I'm not sure I'm ready for this.

The voice in my head kept shouting:

"We are not going to throw up! Not in my America!"

I withdrew my fingers from the sick bag. I didn't want to puke. It would upset the fat couple. That was the last thing I wanted to do.

Now, I felt really bad for my seat companions. They had ended up next to motion-sick Wendell, and I was inching ever closer to complete upheaval. Things were getting dire, the lights in the cabin were fading and I realized I was passing out. The bathroom was now a pipe dream: I couldn't even see anymore. I tapped the window with my fingers; they were starting to go numb.

And inside my brain, a grizzled old brain cell was lowering a megaphone with palpable sense of horror.

"Dear God," he said.

I grabbed the fat arm next to me. "Can you get help?"

My neighbour wasted no time — as though she was listening to the drama in my head for the past fifteen minutes. She understood exactly what I needed. With great size comes great wisdom, I suppose. A stewardess was near me in seconds, and I explained my plight thus:

"I can't see. I feel really sick."

"Are you feeling all right?" she asked. I wasn't sure what to say. I thought I had just explained my situation. Obviously, no, am I not feeling all right. Does anyone ever call for help because they are feeling all right?

I didn't answer, but a plan was already being formulated. Within moments an oxygen tank was passing through the four fat hands beside me. I felt the heavy canister being placed on my lap. The woman next to me helped me get the mask to my face. I held it there with my tingling fingers.

"Breath into it," instructed the sky-wench. Now if you've never enjoyed the privilege of free gas on a flight, all I can say is that it's really embarrassing. Once an oxygen tank makes an appearance, everyone in the plane is thinking the same thing: this guy sucks at flying. And damnit, I do.

I took deep breaths of the canned air, but my vision remained dim, and the urge to blow chunks remained.

I looked up at nothing in particular and shook my head no. "It's not working."

"Would you like some water?"

And everything went very still. Water. Of course.

I took the cup and took a long sip. Instantly, and I mean fucking instantly, I was feeling better. I flayed and clenched my fingers in front of eyes and slowly things were coming back into focus. The darkness was starting to lift. A few more sips out of the tiny glass, and my nausea lifted.

With a shaky hand I sent the oxygen tank aisleward. I turned to the stewardess who turned out to be a most-fuckable brunette with a Pan-Am smile and the demeanour of a complete retard.

I smiled weakly at my neighbours. "Thank you." They looked at me with genuine concern, and suddenly I was feeling grateful to be boxed in next to them.

"I think you might have been dehydrated," offered the dumb-as-shit flight attendant.

I didn't have the strength for a no-shit Sherlock. I was too full of gratitude for not having puked on two fat people on an airplane. I thanked them again and pulled up my blanket. I promptly fell asleep and dreamed, as I always do, of a plane bursting into flames and plunging silently into a dark ocean.

Mayday

Craig leans over the armrest and looks deep into Meg's eyes.

"So, you know how when planes are going down, people start having last-minute sex, and blowing each other and stuff?"

Meg glares back intensely.

"No, they don't. They usually think quietly to themselves and pray."

"Right," and Craig leans further, lowering his voice, "But I was just thinking --"

"No!" shoots back Meg. "I'm not going to have sex with someone I've only known for four hours. And isn't that your girlfriend right beside you?"

Rejected, Craig leans over to the arm rest on the other side.

"Hey, Jen--" he starts to a pair of crossed arms, but she doesn't let him finish.

"Don't even talk to me."

Bilaterally rebuked, Craig slumps back in his chair. Through the tiny window, he gazes at the turbine-in-flames dangling from the plane's wing, and ponders the steep angle of the horizon, as the plane continues its steady and speedy descent.

He thinks quietly to himself and prays, but it is in vain. Craig will die a virgin of high-altitude love-making.

David Bowie drunk at the Tokyo airport, 1970

David: Hey, everybody. Look at that guy. That cat is pretty far out. Look at his screwed up eyes and screwed down hairdo. He's like a, er... leper messiah.